"We were standing, the next minute we're sitting on his knee and he's got his hands up our trousers; we were wearing shorts."

Mr Stevens has told his story in a private session of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

He has also revealed to the ABC that he is drafting a submission to the commissioner to have Sir William, who died in 1970, stripped of his peerage.

He also wants Sir William's name removed from William Slim Drive, a road named after the former Queen's representative in Canberra, where Mr Stevens lives.

"A submission is being put to the commission that ... that name is removed from that drive and that his peerage is taken away from him," Mr Stevens said.

"I don't care how brilliant a man he might have been militarily, if he abused children the way I was abused and others, I don't think people like that have the right to continue that person's name in terms of peerage that goes on from family to family to family. I think it's outrageous.

"For me it's never left me and it can't leave me. Not only because of the horrible memory of it, but I live in Canberra."

'Perpetrators of evil got away with it'

Mr Stevens has the support of David Hill, a former Fairbridge boy and ABC managing director who wrote a book about the school, The Forgotten Children.

"Good on Bob. It's a very bold gesture," Mr Hill said.

"But if you think about it all of the perpetrators of this evil against children got away with it. Not one of them has paid any price for their crime."

Mr Hill says in the course of researching his book he spoke to two other boys who said Sir William molested them in the same circumstances.

"It wasn't just one story, it was three. Now the three haven't seen each other since they left Fairbridge and yet they all told the same story," he said.

Derek Moriarty, another plaintiff in the case, says the children were also subjected to emotional torment.

"'You're nothing but a guttersnipe, you came out the gutter, you will end up in the gutter, you'll never amount to anything, your parents didn't want you, they didn't love you, nobody loves you, you'll never be loved and you'll never love anybody'," he said.

"When you hear that for eight years, over and over and over, you tend to start believing it."

He says he suffered regular beatings and was sexually abused by a staff member.

"You feel it's something you did, not something the perpetrator did and to this day, I've had counselling for five years, I still think it's my fault," Mr Moriarty said.

Mr Hill says the delay in the court case has been too long for some.

"It's not fair. Five of the original 70 victims have died since the legal action started and I think they've suffered enough," he said.

Lawyer says governments should have settled by now

Roop Sandhu, a lawyer with Slater and Gordon, is representing the former child migrants in the class action.

Mr Sandhu says the recent court judgment is a landmark decision because it is the first time a court has granted child migrants the right to sue the State Government.

But he says the most humane approach now would be to settle the case out of court.

"The defendants have fought it tooth and nail but the real question is why they've done that and to that I really have no idea," Mr Sandhu said.

"It seems to me the sort of case where the defendants, particularly the Commonwealth and State Government, should be doing what they can to avoid a court process and doing what they can to spare people that have been through so very much already from the trauma of court."

Mr Hill believes any compensation awarded to victims will only go so far.

"How do you compensate somebody who's been broken and their childhood stolen?" he said.